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Sunday, July 8, 2012

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) X-Box 360

Plot
Synopsis: In attempt to usher
in the new era of Oscorp Alistair Smythe shifts the focus from cross species to
nano-tech robots. It goes about as well
as you’d think.

The Good:

-The Stan Lee pre-order bonus. He’s pretty well rendered and just spouts
nonsense the whole time you play as him.
Plus there’s just something inherently funny about an old dude running
around Manhattan all flexy and bendy.

-Web slinging is pretty fun, the new web rush is pretty
alright.

-The fresh take on Spidey’s rouges. Vermin, Rhino and Scorpion are all realized
as cross-species which makes them far more visually interesting and
intimidating. I don’t know if it makes
them better characters but they are consistent with the universe at least. Black Cat is realized as an escaped mental
patient who also pretty bad-ass in the bank robbery mission.

-The photography missions.
A reporter woman sends you to locations to take 3 pictures of the things
going on in those areas. They use this
as a means to reference other characters from the Spidey universe including:
Sandman, Hydroman, Mr. Negative and return cameo of Black Cat.

-The combat is cool with its new wrestling style attacks.

-The graphics are pretty awesome.

-A bunch of good looking costumes to unlock.

The Bad:

-It’s nice to see Bruce Campbell but I found his missions to
be the most tedious. There are two
kinds: follow Spidey with a camera, which are at least fun to watch but pretty
easy and racing which gets pretty boring.
The only good thing I can say is that right at the moment I was the most
sick of these missions I was done. I
literally almost quit for good but decided to do one more side mission which
resulted in an achievement for finishing the camera type so I did one more
hoping it would be the last race and it was.
I was quite relieved.

-Sadly no Peter Porker: Spider-Ham or Bombastic Bag Man
costumes.

-Tracking down infected civilians and escaped mental
patients. It gets really, really tedious
after a while. Go to point A, pick up a
person and take them to point B. That’s
it. Over and over and over. It feels like a way to pad the game.

-There’s no combo to hang a guy from a light post, like in Spider-Man
2 (called, in that game, the Web Hanger)

-I really hope this isn’t cannon as far as the movies are
concerned because this isn’t really consistent with the movie, it creates a lot
of confusing holes and the story isn’t really that great. It’s good enough to move a video game forward
but the story-telling isn’t why you play this game.

-You have to rely on a lot of stealth as Spider-Man is pretty
squishy but the stealth isn’t that great.
They did a better job with Noir Spider-Man in shattered dimensions. The hardest part of this is the camera and
the controls, the camera flips around and the controls will invert at a moment’s
notice leaving you vulnerable and open to making mistakes. Noir Spider-Man had the same problem but it
didn’t feel as severe.

-Spider-Man is really squishy, there are upgrades to make him
more resistant to attacks but that really only changes him from extremely
squishy to moderately squishy.

-By the games end combat gets pretty repetitive.

-Web rush is fun at first but really removes any active
participation in getting from point A to point B. I feel like we had more control, more options
and more fun in previous Spider-Man games, particularly Spider-Man 2 and even
Spider-Man 3.

The Ugly:

-The camera gets out of control sometimes.

Final
Thoughts: I played this game
to the end and did basically everything there is to do. I did all the photography side missions, the
X-Treme reporter, I saved all the infected civilians, returned all the mental
patients, researched all the weird sewer activity and stole all the technology
from Oscorp’s secret labs. So clearly
this isn’t a bad game, if this game was terrible I wouldn’t have done all
that. I really enjoyed my time with the
game but the game is certainly flawed. I
paid full price on this because I wanted to play as Stan Lee, which is awesome,
but I don’t know if I would recommend spending so much on it if you don’t get a
bonus. I don’t know what the Rhino rush
bonus was like or if that makes it worth a full purchase but I would recommend,
if you’re a fan of the movie or a fan of Spidey, to wait until this one drops
in price a bit before picking it up.

It’s certainly one of the better Spider-Man
games to come along but I was hoping that this would end up being pretty much a
remake of the Spider-Man 2 game. I loved
that game, that is by far the best Spider-Man game ever made, why they don’t
just do a HD remake of that game I have no idea (probably has to do with
licensing BS) but that would make a great X-Box Arcade game. Until that happens though if you want a good
HD Spider-Man experience then this it.